By Thomas Harrington at Brownstone dot org.

[The following is an excerpt from Dr. Thomas Harrington's book, Treason of the Experts: Covid and the Credentialed Class.]

I don't know about you, but long ago I learned how to recognize when I was suffering from a cold or flu, and how best to prevent myself and others from suffering from its most deleterious effects.

I developed knowledge in this area by simply watching and listening to others, and then verifying these theoretical inputs against the observable reactions and comportments of my own body.

I do not think I am unique in this. I think that, if left to their own devices, most people can determine the difference between a sore throat with a runny nose and a malady that may be attacking their body in a more serious and systematic way.

Perhaps, I should correct myself. I believe that until 22 months ago most people could confidently engage in this time-honed process of discernment. Now I am not sure that is the case.

What has changed?

What has changed is that there has been a concerted psychological campaign to effectively insert abstract and often empirically questionable paradigms of sickness between individual citizens and their understanding of their own bodies, paradigms expressly designed to remove the locus of control from that citizen and his or her instincts and deposit it in the hands of some combination of medical and governmental authority.

Viewed in terms of metaphors of sight, we could say that a distorting lens provided by outside forces that places a great emphasis on vulnerability and dependence rather than resilience is now mediating, and thus reconfiguring, the relationship that millions of people have with their own sense of health, as well as with their fellow citizens.

The mechanism used to effect for this massive usurpation of individual confidence and instinct was, of course, mass testing which conferred on the government and their chosen health officials what Gabriel García Marquez suggests in One Hundred Years of Solitude is one of the greatest cultural powers of all: the power to name.

What up until early 2020 was a set of symptoms referenced loosely and imprecisely under the rubric of "seasonal colds and flus" and expected to be lived as a perennial and unremarkable personal matter, has with the onset of mass testing been given a specific name and imbued with an all-encompassing spectral presence.

Once again, the template used to create and justify the War on Terror is instructive here. Before the inception of that never-ending pretext for projecting US power, war largely concerned soldiers who were defined in terms of their oppositional relationship to civilians. The first were fair game as objects of attack, but the second, at least in theory, were not.

What the war on terror did was to basically redefine everyone in the world, including US citizens, as potential soldiers against all that was considered good and right by the US government. How was this done? By amassing intelligence on everyone - intelligence, of course, that only government officials had the ability to see and manipulate - we were all turned into suspects, or if you prefer, pre-criminals.

After all, is there any one of us whose being could not be made to appear suspicious and thus worthy of attack (be it in the form of character assassination, strategic maiming, or outright legal entrapment) by a group of people with full editorial control of the most minute details of our personal lives?

Before the Spring of 2020, one was either sick or well according to long-understood empirical measures.

But with the advent of mass testing for asymptomatic people (with a test designed to generate copious false positives), and with it, the invention of the mythology of rampant asymptomatic transmission, the elites gained the instant ability to portray millions of us as "pre-sick," and thus as potentially grave threats to the general welfare.

And now the generalized suspicion and fear they h...